Even in a year of big albums — To Be Kind, Benji, Lost In The Dream — YOB’s Clearing The Path To Ascend felt HUGE. Of course, that’s nothing new for the Portland, OR doom trio, who’d released six albums of elephantine majesty leading up to the new one, but Clearing The Path To Ascend is massive even by the band’s own standards. That thundering grandeur is evident in the album’s spiritualistic lyrical themes as well as the music, built like a castle using only four component parts — guitar, bass, drums, vocals — each one galloping through the mix with the fury and bombast of the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse across the sky. That charge is led by frontman/visionary Mike Scheidt, one of modern metal’s truly great artists: a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist with few if any peers. Clearing The Path To Ascend is YOB at their most frenzied (“Nothing To Win”) as well as their gentlest (“Marrow”), but taken as whole, its four songs feel like the seasons or the elements: powerful, eternal, wondrous, and bigger than all of us. –Michael [LISTEN]